Surviving Hope
by Hayabusa1138
Summary: In the aftermath of the Battle of Hoth, an Alliance admiral and his wife get the horrible news that their daughter did not survive. On their trip to recover her body, they find more than they expect. Sequel to Recovering Home and Survival Instinct.


The office of the Alliance assault frigate _Resurgent Dawn_ was silent despite the presence of two people inside of it. They sat behind a desk made from fine Alderaanian oak, it's now rare dark surface polished to an impeccable shine. The shine reflected the blue light coming from a circular holoemitter over the office, an icy sheen covering the walls.

The holo depicted a human family in obviously happier times: three darker-skinned adults and one fair-skinned man standing next to a small girl. All five of them were grinning heavily. It had been taken during a vacation to the Killik mounds nearly a decade ago, the fair-skinned male thought. His wife, his nine year-old daughter and his in-laws had enjoyed their brief respite from duty on that day and enjoyed the beauty of the spitcreted towers created millenia previously. Of the people in the picture, only two...

He squeezed his wife's hand tightly and choked at the lump in his throat threatening to strangle him where he sat. Her strong and deft fingers, honed after years of replacing console and computer modules, gripped his hand nearly just as tightly. He turned his head and looked at her. Though her black hair had greyed slightly around her ears and small lines of crows feet surrounded her brown eyes, she was still just as beautiful now as she was when the holo had been taken, he thought.

"Are you ready?" he said, his voice a mere squeak in the silence. She exhaled deeply and slowly nodded her head. He turned off the holoemitter and activated his comlink. "Send him in."

The door to the office opened and another human male walked into the room. He was wearing the orange flight suit that all Alliance starfighter pilots wore. His dark brown hair was in disarray from the helmet that must have been left behind on his ship after his flight from the _New Hope_ dreadnaught nearby. He was young, barely into his mid-twenties but the look of his brown eyes seemed to make him look older than he was. He saluted. "Admiral Wentlas," he said. The pilot turned to Galen's wife. "Captain Wentlas." The tone of his rural Agamarian accent was polite and well disciplined. How many times had he made this exact same speech before?

"Commander Farlander," Galen said with a quick nod. The gesture was almost all he could will himself to do.

"I was your daughter's commanding officer during the battle," he said. He took the seat that was offered to him. He moved his attention equally between the both of them, Galen noticed. "She had volunteered to take a snowspeeder for Blue Squadron while we covered the evacuation from the base. I paired her with Lieutenant Tav Nay'yka, one of my best shots.

"We were tasked with protecting a small pass in the mountains off of the main plain," the pilot added. "Command was worried that the Empire would send walkers, probe droids or hover tanks to the this pass and try to flank Echo Base's prepared defenses." Anya squeezed her husband's hand again, halfway to reassure him and the other half to help herself. Galen knew what was coming up. He had given this speech before to family members of deceased crew members, but he had never imagined that one day he would be hearing it for himself.

"Lieutenant Wentlas fought bravely," Farlander said. "Her snowspeeder scored kills on three probe droids and a scout walker. She was making another pass on another scout walker when a concussion missile exploded near her speeder." His disciplined tone was betrayed only slightly by a pause. "Your daughter tried to pull out of her dive, but she was unable to. Her speeder landed intact in the snow, but there were no comm transmissions from either her or Nay'yka for the rest of the battle. I flew by the crash site several times and there was no movement at all, even on my final fly-by about an hour later when my squadron was evacuating the planet."

"Nothing?" Anya said. Her voice strained with emotion. She sobbed silently, finally letting out all of the emotion that she had been holding back. Galen wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close to him. Decades before, after the loss of his ship's partial namesake and the deaths of his and Anya's bunkmates, he was an emotional wreck. Now he only felt a cold and empty numbness in his chest. He just sat behind his desk, holding his wife with his mouth slightly agape.

Galen watched Farlander struggle with something and knew that the young pilot had taken responsibility for all that had happened within his own mind. "No," he finally said. "I didn't hear anything. I didn't see anything." The pilot paused again. "I didn't _feel_ anything." Galen wondered what that sense had to do with it. "Your daughter and her gunner died in the crash and I'm sorry. If there's anything that I can do, just let me know. If you can't reach me, comm Lynia Delline on the _New Hope_ , she's one of Mon Mothma's aides and she knows how to reach me."

"Thank you, Commander," Galen said. His voice was nearly monotone. The pilot nodded his understanding and saluted once more before heading out the door, leaving Galen and Anya alone in the office.

Galen closed his eyes, holding them tightly shut. In his mind he could see the ice-covered tundra of Hoth, a wrecked speeder half-buried under the snow. His daughter was slumped over the control yoke with her dark hair matted with frozen blood. She was alone and unmourned, her only monument the vehicle that she had died in. He opened his eyes again, protesting the scene.

Anya Wentlas sat in their quarters. clad in a light green sleeping gown, her head in her hands. The possibility of death in the Rebellion was never a stranger to her: she had lost friends, family and homeworld to the Empire and knew of many more that had somehow lost even more than that. That she may one day lose her daughter, though, had barely even crossed her mind with a semblance of seriousness. Yet war never cared for anyone's hopes, she thought bitterly.

A part of her was gone. She felt that deep void within her and knew that it could never be filled again even if she would have another child some day. She had carried Alexis for nine of the most hellish months of her life: the aftermath of the _Resurgence_ 's destruction and the six long months of laying low in the Alderaanian palace or her parent's home, holing up in her and Galen's state room while some Imperial dignitary visited, when Galen had to leave her behind when Organa's spies found the Sarlacc Project that had led to it all, sitting beside his bedside as he recovered from the wounds he had suffered. And now Alexis was dead.

The words of an old superstition came to her mind. Anya was never one to believe in superstitions, but she still remembered her grandmother telling her this after a cousin had given birth in the aftermath of Grievous' horrific attack on Alderaan. "Children born around death are destined to be followed by it." It had seemed quaint and old fashioned by that time, and the entire family had laughed about it. If true, though, how cursed were children conceived around death?

She looked over to the bed where Galen was sleeping and thought him lucky as she rubbed her tired eyes. She walked over to the small kitchenette and poured herself a cup of caf before returning to the table. He had gone numb inside like she had when she learned of Alderaan's destruction. She wished that she could be as detached from the reality of the situation as she had been back then instead of having her bare and raw emotions dragged through coals.

The cup of caf was empty now and Anya quietly changed out of her sleeping gown and into an Alliance uniform. The door opened with a soft hiss as she left their quarters and roamed semi-aimlessly throughout the durasteel hallways of the cobbled together ship. She soon found herself in the long and thin spar that connected the dreadnaught prow to the two large solar fins in the stern. Docking tube three was beneath her feet and she kneeled to the ground and input the passcode. Galen had mentioned something about leaving the ship tomorrow, so she might as well make sure that their ship was ready. She had to do something other than just sit and mourn.

She felt her gut flip as she left the gravity plates of the assault frigate and into the field generated by the Rendili-made star cruiser. The cruiser's airlock was in the back of its round, two-deck rear, forcing the craft to dock with the frigate "upside-down." She exited the airlock and stepped into the circular room beyond. Two large doors flanked an open lift to her left. Anya's eyes paused on the door directly to her right, her heart sinking lower than it already was: Alexis' room, she thought painfully. She turned to her left and entered one of the several storage rooms and emerged with a tool kit.

The lift took her up to the modified cockpit, two pilot's stations in front of a rectangular window that overlooked the ship's flat front section. To her left, towards the rear of the ship, a row of seats for passengers lined the back wall. Anya walked over to the sensor suite near the ship's flight yoke. The last time that they had flown the ship, she remembered, they had been a bit on the slow side. She killed the power supply to it and went to work.

The panel slid open easily, revealing neatly organized wires connecting the display panel to the floor, into the crawlspace where it would eventually connect to the sensors themselves. With her multitool she loosened the wire's connection to the panel's motherboard and then tested the board itself. That was the problem, she thought as she pried at it. The motherboard had sometime through out the years had loosened itself in its moorings. She loosened the screws and then reset the board, reconnecting it to the console and putting the wires back into their proper slots.

Done, she thought as she lay on the ground. There were still other things to do, diagnostics to run and other connections to check. Her eyes felt heavy under the weight of far too many hours without sleep. She blinked hard to clear them and then again.

Her eyes opened to unfamiliar sights. She was on a soft bed in a dark room, her head and aching neck muscles resting on a pillow while a soft thermal blanket covered her body. She sat up and looked around, recognizing the room as Galen and hers small quarters aboard the courier. Anya stepped out of the bed, wondering how she had gotten there.

"...Land, I have complete faith in you," she could hear Galen say as she opened the door into the main cabin. "I've seen you command the _Dawn_ before and I know you can do it."

The young Captain Hol Land stood at the entrance of the airlock, the Duros male pleading with her husband. "I'm just saying that so soon after Hoth, we have to be vigilant. I can't command..."

"I'm not asking you to command my fleet, Captain, the _New Hope_ is already doing that. All you need to do is command your frigate. Meanwhile," he motioned towards her, "my wife and I are going to go get our daughter." Anya watched as several petty officers emerged from the air lock, pushing just as many repulsor-driven stasis coffins past the three of them and into the cargo bay.

"I'm sorry for you loss, Admiral," Land said. He turned to Anya, noseless face crinkled in the Duros expression for compassion, "Captain." The Duros bowed to both of them and left the crowded ship along with the techs.

"I was beginning to wonder when you'd wake up," Galen said, his voice soft as he closed the airlock behind them. "I'm surprised you didn't when I was moving you."

"I had trouble sleeping," she said. He nodded and motioned towards the lift back up to the cockpit. He wrapped a comforting arm around her.

"So you worked yourself to exhaustion," he said. He sat down in the pilot's chair and she followed up to the co-pilot's station. She watched as he stared out into the space beyond the viewport, his hands moved up to his face and twisted into his greying brown hair.

Anya gently rubbed his back. "Can we do this?" she said.

"We have to," Galen said. "I don't want her to just be sitting there."

Anya looked out the viewport, past the mating of a Nebulon-B frigate and a dreadnaught cruiser that was the _Resurgent Dawn_ and into the cluster of stars that was the Anoat sector. The stars raced towards their ship, soon to be replaced by the blue ribbons of hyperspace.

The trip through hyperspace to the Hoth system took nearly two days. Anya stared at the ice-covered world through the viewport. It was the graveyard of so many, she thought, Imperial and Rebel alike now called that frozen hell their final resting place. Not her daughter, she thought with resolve. Her daughter would be found and taken to the Graveyard of Alderaan. Alexis had always loved Alderaan.

"Not seeing any Imperial activity," Galen said as he scanned the sensors. He turned to look at her and flashed her a sad smile that Anya returned. Over the past day, he had begun to come out of his protective shell somewhat and they had spent the last night just holding each other tightly as they wept for their fallen daughter.

"They know this planet has nothing else to give them," Anya said, still staring unblinking at the planet.

"Pull up the map," Galen said as entered the planet's atmosphere minutes later. With a quick series of keystrokes, she had a small facsimile of the area within five kilometers of Echo Base.

"I think that this is the pass that Commander Farlander was talking about," Anya said as she pointed to a small valley near the base. She felt the wind buffet the craft as it dipped lower and lower through the atmosphere. A large mountain range loomed in the distance "We should be coming up on the base soon."

Anya gasped as they passed the mountains and entered the plains just past Echo Base. Groundworks and trenches that had spiderwebbed throughout the ice were pockmarked with craters of black ash. She watched as they passed crashed snowspeeders in various stages of disrepair. Destroyed scout walkers stood with their two long legs standing, supporting nothing but what little remained of its command compartment. One lay on its "back" it's left leg pointed upwards in the sky in mid kick. The larger AT-AT walkers lay lopsided upon the ground, front legs buckled forward and the rear ones pointing into the air. Snowspeeder debris lay around several of them.

The courier slowed as it banked into the canyon and Anya's heart leapt into her throat even as her stomach sank deeply into her as it did. A hundred meters away from a wrecked scout walker was a crashed snowspeeder. It's left wing was buried deeply into the snow, it's canopy gone. She couldn't make the interior and some part of her thanked her for it.

"It's the only one..." Galen said as he sat the craft down upon the soft ground several meters away from the crash. His voice was haggard from grief and stress. "Get your gear on," he said, undoing his crash restraints. "I have to get the stasis chambers ready, then I'll get dressed, too." He placed his hand upon her shoulder and gave a weak but reassuring squeeze.

She undid her own restraints and took the lift down with him to the first deck of the courier. He walked past the door to their cabin and towards the cargo hold in the front of the ship. In the small closet next to the bed were their winter gear: a thick brown coat with an interior of white fur, a tan wrap to guard their faces against the freezing winds, thick insulated pants, and long boots. She dressed silently in the cabin. Galen said nothing either when he entered the room, just dressing in silence with her.

His eyes met hers for a second, half-closed in exhaustion, silently questioning. _Can we do this?_ She nodded a single nod. _We have to_. They had already come so far and risked so much. They left the room together and into the open airlock door.

Anya felt the cold early-morning air slam into her uncovered eyes and the bridge of her nose. Her booted feet sank to her shins in the drifted snow, making every step more tiring than the last. She leaned against the repulsorsled she was pushing for strength, hoping that she wouldn't fall, wouldn't show weakness right now. Up ahead the canopy-less speeder loomed.

"Galen," she said. She stopped and stared at the speeder in the distance, hours of reading after-action reports and hearing Commander Farlander's account of the battle replaying. "Wasn't her speeder intact?"

"Could have been a mistake," he replied. She could hear the slightest bit of doubt in his voice. "The wind could have..."

She pushed the coffin away from her and broke out running towards the speeder. "Anya, wait!" she could hear Galen call out behind her. She didn't listen. Her lungs and legs burned from the exertion as she sprinted through the snow, the crashed snowspeeder now tantalizingly close.

Exhausted and out of breath, she reached the speeder and climbed onto the half-broken wing. She looked into the cockpit and the blaster-scarred hinges of where the canopy was supposed to be. Anya collapsed onto the wing, her knees aching from the impact. A strange mixture of sobs and laughter escaped her mouth and crystallized into the freezing air.

"Anya..." she heard Galen say behind her. She heard the airframe of wing creak slightly under their combined weight as he climbed next to her. She felt him hold her tightly even through their coats, a reassuring and comforting gesture that was no longer needed. He stood up and moved beside her, looking into the cockpit for himself. "Sithspit..." he cursed under his breath as he saw for himself that it was empty.

The cockpit of the snowspeeder was empty. It was the only rational thought that Galen could even attempt to think at the moment. The snowspeeder was empty and his daughter was certainly not in it. She wasn't slumped up to the console like he had envisioned in his nightmares, she wasn't half hanging out of the cockpit with injuries that had taken her before she could escape. She just wasn't there.

The gunner's seat told a different story. The rear of the craft was mangled from where the killing shot had hit it, metal peeling away from the impact site. The gunner's seat was a mess of shredded fabric and frozen blood. Whatever injuries that Alexis had incurred, they weren't as bad as her gunner.

He slid down the fuselage and sat on the wing. He looked up at Anya, who met his gazes with eyes glimmering in a way he hadn't seen for nearly a month. He matched her relieved smile and let out a laugh that was half a sigh. "She was alive," he finally said. They smiled, spirits finally unburdened.

The snow crunched against Galen's boots as he climbed off of the broken wing of the snowspeeder. He walked to the side of the speeder and inspected the open storage compartment. Snowspeeders couldn't hold that much cargo, especially if they were going into battle. Usually, the small compartment held only enough room for a survival pack and a few other choice items. As he looked into the already open compartment he saw nothing but the gray durasteel back.

"They were alive," he said as Anya joined him. "They survived and they took the pack."

Anya pointed to the burnt hinges on the back of the cockpit. "The canopy, too."

"Her gunner was wounded, badly it looked like." Galen studied the snow at the crash site. Nearly a month's worth of wind and snowfall obscuring any marks save for their own footsteps. "She may have..."

"Used it as a sled," Anya finished his thought. "Could she have made it to the base?"

Galen paused to think. Alexis wasn't necessarily the strongest, but she what she did have was a determination that rivaled their own. "I know that she thought she could," he said. He tempered the hope he felt within his heart, trying to lower his expectations. Sure she had survived the crash, he thought, but she could still be out there in the snow, her body joining several of the other Rebel and Imperial casualties of the battle. The hope that she was alive was already entrenched, holding out against any of his half-hearted attempts to quash it. "Let's get back to the ship. We'll find her."

The courier crawled through the air as slow as it could, its hull so close to the ground that the tallest snow drifts nearly touched the bottom of it's ailerons. Galen piloted the craft around the curve of the mountain and into the plain where the fighting had been its heaviest. Flying this far had taken a mere minute, he thought. How long had it taken his daughter?

A kilometer away was the closest walker. Like the others it had been toppled during the battle, a victim of a tow cable wrapped around its metal ankles. One of the hatches on the side was opened, revealing racks of speeder bikes inside. "There!" Anya said, pointing out the transparisteel object as it glinted in the afternoon sun.

A memory flashed into his mind of the last time that he had seen one of the giant walkers up close. It had been right before the _Resurgence_ was destroyed, when the strike team that he was a member of was fleeing Imperial Center. One of them had been waiting for them at the hangar. His daughter had been here and she had seen the behemoth for herself. Was she as frightened as he was, even if the one she approached was knocked out?

The canopy was sitting next to an opening in the walker's neck. Galen inspected it, looked over the blaster-shot transparisteel and the tow cable strung between the two holes. In the distance, the engines of his ship idled almost silently against the wind. Anya was next to him, clutching her coat closer to her with her gloved hands. He climbed through the opening and into the AT-AT's interior.

The hole opened into the main hull of the craft. The open cargo hatch illuminated the room, beams of sunlight interrupted by dark shadows cast by the bike racks. To his right was a body covered by a thermal blanket, sitting up against the slanted wall. Closer to him, a powered down thermal generator was propped up against various pieces of debris. The foil package of an emergency ration bar was crumpled up next to the generator.

"Is that..." Anya's voice echoed through the walker's compartment.

Galen walked towards the blanketed corpse, the cold of the walker's wall seeping through his gloves as he balanced himself. His hand hesitated over the blanket even though his fingers easily grasped at the fabric. He could hear Anya breathe in deeply behind him. After seconds of indecision that felt like minutes, he finally pulled the blanket down from the being's face. A wave of relief washed over him as a male canid-equine face was uncovered. Tav Nay'yka's eyes were closed, a thin layer of frost over his furred skin. His orange flightsuit clung tightly to his flesh, dried blood marring the flak jacket on his chest.

"It's not her." Galen turned to Anya. "Go get one of the stasis tubes from the ship, I'll get him out here."

"One of the bikes is gone," Anya mentioned. She motioned towards the top of the walker, where one of the many speeder bikes that an AT-AT walker carried was gone.

Echo Base's main entrance loomed open before her, the bodies of Rebel soldiers slain while fleeing the base littering the field in front of it. An Imperial speeder bike lay on the ground, the power cell regulating its repulsorlifts dead. "This is it," Anya said. She turned to look at her husband and saw that Galen was already deep into the hangar.

"No _Falcon_ ," she said. The hangar was empty save for the discarded speeder bike and several snowspeeders in various stages of disrepair. The _Millennium Falcon_ had been the ship that Princess Leia Organa had attempted to escape the planet on and after a month of not reporting in, the high command had feared the worst. Searching for them was the official reason for the trip to Hoth. At least they had made it off planet, Anya thought.

"Alexis!" Galen cried out. Even outside of the large ice-carved hangar she could hear his scream reverberate off of the wall. He called out for their daughter again and she added her voice to his.

"Lex!" she screamed again, the icy air scratching at her raw throat. If she was alive, Anya thought, she would have to be in the base. The thought was strange and especially cruel to Anya's mind. Alexis would have survived being shot down and crashing into the snow, walking Force knows how many kilometers dragging her dying copilot, spending a harsh Hoth night in the belly of a downed AT-AT walker only for her to possibly be killed so close to home. Only the echoes of their cries answered them.

"Maybe we should check the quarters," Galen suggested. They walked through the hallways of the deserted base, passing each slain Rebel with a look of trepidation. There were no Imperial casualties beside their slain foes, Anya noted. Whether it was a testament to their efficiency in clearing the base or to the fact they the Imperials left none of their dead behind was unknown to her. She passed another Rebel body on the ground, a male human with blonde hair. He had a family that was worried about him, she thought, and here she was relieved that it wasn't her child. She felt almost selfish at the thought.

The two entered the medical bay, a deactivated surgical droid standing next to the wall. Blaster shots scorched and melted the ice walls in front of her. A small pool of frozen blood was on the icy floor. Anya followed the smaller drips on the ground into a room to the left and saw the black blaster rifle laying next to a console. She walked over to the rifle on the floor. It was 3/4 of a meter long and simple in its design: a thin metal cylinder with its energy cell jutting off to the left hand side, a folding shoulder stock outstretched diagonally from the main body. It was Nazren-made and gifted to Galen when he took his part of the Alderaanian fleet to fully liberate the planet almost a decade previously. He had given it to Alexis when she went out on her own shortly after Yavin.

"She was here," Anya said, looking at the second pool of blood next to it. It was smaller and flanked by discarded medical supplies. The Empire had tried to save her life? The thought seemed alien to her. For over 20 years the Empire had been a constant threat, their barbarity the things of nightmares. Now they may have captured her little girl.

"They've got her," Anya said to Galen. She held him as tight as their coats would allow.

"We'll find her," Galen promised. "No matter what it takes."

It was two weeks later and Galen was sitting in his office aboard the _Resurgent Dawn_ once again. He had contacted the woman that Commander Farlander had given her comm frequency to, and she had arranged a meeting with the woman sitting in front of him.

"Are you his handler?" he asked her.

"I guess you can say that," she replied in an Alderaanian accent with an Alderan dialect. She was in her mid to late twenties and tan skinned. Her black hair was pulled back behind her and secured in a tail with an orange tie. Her white-clad arms were folded over her tan short-sleeved uniform, her right hand covered by a leather glove the hid a metal prosthesis.

"And the stories I hear are true?" Rumors abounded about their exploits, most of them far too unlikely to be handled by only two Rebels.

"You know those Super Star Destroyers?" she asked.

"I've seen one." His mind flashed back to nearly 20 years in the past, flying his star courier-recently stolen from a dead inquisitor-through the damaged hull of the prototype Super Star Destroyer that was the Sarlacc Project to destroy it.

"He snuck aboard one of them, right under the nose of Darth Vader, and made off with a ship inside. He used that ship to get aboard another Star Destroyer and destroy it and the factories within it."

"Sounds unbelievable."

"I would have thought the same thing if I hadn't seen it myself," she said. "Now that we've established reputation, what's the job?"

"Simple for you two, and a bit of overkill," Galen said. "There's a computer database on Gannis that has a list of all the prisoners taken on Hoth and their current locations."

The agent's eyes narrowed. "How did you find out about this?"

Galen thought of the black-plated protocol droid that he had helped during the hunt for the Sarlacc Project and his initial attempts to find his daughter. It had led him only to this. "I cashed in a favor with twenty years of interest," he said. "Credits are no issue to me herep; you and your partner will get your money, no matter what it takes. I want that database and I only need to see one name on it, then Alliance intelligence can have the rest of it."

She nodded and extended her gloved hand. Galen shook it. "Well, you have a deal. Kyle and I will get that database for you."


End file.
